No Man’s Sky: All Known Bugs and Glitches So Far

No Man’s Sky

Hello Games’ ambitious space exploration title has finally been released on the PS4, and while it’s been great fun so far, the game has also been plagued with quite a few bugs and potentially game-breaking issues. In order to save yourself some trouble, we recommend making a backup of your save file every now and then, and upload it to the cloud if possible.

Do note that the following bugs and glitches were found in the PS4 version of the game, and they might not necessarily be in the PC version.

Pre-Order Ship Glitch

If you pre-ordered No Man’s Sky on PS4, you’ll get a cool starship for free. However, you might want to hold off on redeeming the ship until after you’ve completed the tutorial mission that requires you to build a hyper drive. Players have reported that if you claim the ship before crafting a hyper drive, you’ll be able to skip that mission and start jumping to other systems once you have the warp cells for it. This is because the preorder ship itself already comes with the hyper drive.

However, once you jump to other star systems and once you decide to trade off your ship for a new one, you’ll find that none of the new ships you find will come with a hyper drive. The game requires you to have crafted one for yourself before you’ll be able to find new ships with hyper drives. This means that once you trade off your pre-order ship, you’ll be stuck with a new ship that can’t jump to other systems.

You can get around this problem by searching for blueprints for the hyper drive, but the chances of this are pretty small, and this will likely leave you stranded in whatever system you’re in.

Ships Can Take Off Without You

This is a bit of an unfortunate one, and it’s not clear what events triggered it. According to a redditor, his starship somehow managed to take off on its own, leaving him behind on the planet that he was on. From the screenshot above, you can literally see his starship flying off into the sky, and possibly back into outer space.

While it’s certainly possible to get off the planet without the ship, it’s going to take a lot of time. You can either hope to find a trading post and build a bypass chip to call your ship back (if you have the crafting recipe, and it’s been reported that this solution didn’t work), or you could buy a ship from another trader. But ships are expensive, and you’ll have to farm the units for it.

The best thing to do here is to reload your last save, though that could potentially set you back hours if you haven’t reached a checkpoint.

Players Can’t See Each Other When in the Same Area

When No Man’s Sky was first announced, Hello Games’ Sean Murray stated that though the chances of players meeting were very slim because of the size of the game, it wasn’t impossible. Players wouldn’t be able to know what they looked like, but they would be able to find out if another player managed to find them and see them.

However, it looks like it’s impossible to meet up with other players right now. Two Twitch streamers found themselves on the same planet on launch day, and tried all sorts of ways to meet up. They were definitely in the same location, but were unable to see each other. It’s not clear whether this ‘multiplayer’ feature has been completely removed from the game, or if the servers are just too overloaded right now for the devs to implement this feature properly, but it’s there.

You Can’t Remove Waypoints

Say you have three full waypoints right now, and they’re all directing you to Atlas or whatever. But you come across a black hole that you really want to jump into. If you choose to jump into the black hole, there’s a good chance that you’re going to end up in a system really far from where you originally were.

But that’s not the problem. Your waypoints will still be filled up with those Atlas ones, and there’s no way to remove them. This means that all your waypoints will lead you to systems that are thousands of light years away from you, and you can’t receive new waypoints at your new location to replace them with.

So here’s a tip for now: check off all your waypoints before jumping into a black hole, or have fun following a galactic path that’s light years away.

Objective Screen Glitch

While playing through No Man’s Sky on PS4, we encountered a pretty annoying glitch that required us to restart the game completely. It’s not game-breaking, but it is enough of an annoyance to warrant a mention here. While sprinting towards out starship, the character ran out of stamina and jumped into the ship while the game told us to wait for our stamina to recharge.

However, once we started flying off, the objective wouldn’t change, and continued to tell us to wait for the stamina regen. The only way to reset this was by quitting out of the game completely and launching it again.

Lots of Crashes While Warping

This is a pretty common issue that PS4 players are experiencing right now. Whenever you use the hyper drive to warp to another star system, there’s a good chance that the game might crash and send you straight back to the PS4 menu. Because the game doesn’t save until you exit your ship or discover a new outpost on a planet, the crash might set you back by quite a bit as well.

My advice here is to always stop at a space station before warping off to a new star system.